


Rock On, Gold Dust Woman

by moonriverdrifter



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Drugs, F/F, Fleetwood Mac, Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-16 06:41:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17544671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonriverdrifter/pseuds/moonriverdrifter
Summary: My entry for the "Hilda + Zelda + drugs" prompt at Together As Sisters. Two-shot





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UbiquitousMixie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UbiquitousMixie/gifts).



> Rated M for now because drugs. Next chapter may go up to E. I haven't decided yet.

Zelda has always been fairly tolerant of her siblings’ and nephew’s little phases. After all, somewhere in a desk drawer is pictorial evidence of her own infatuation with the flapper style, bobbed hair and pencil eyebrows and all the rest. Edward has threatened her with it more than once; in most recent memory, it was when he briefly experimented with short pants and she accused him of tackiness.

And so when Ambrose shows up at the breakfast table in nothing but a pair of ridiculously flared jeans and a string of beads around his neck, Zelda bites her tongue. There is, after all, no harm in allowing the lad his Jimi Hendrix records and ridiculous sartorial choices. It’s not as though he’s at liberty to turn up at coven events looking like an unwashed, long-haired embarrassment to the Spellman name.

Hilda, on the other hand. She is late to Black Mass one morning, and when she finally shows up, Edward and Zelda’s faces practically define the phrase “abject horror.” Father Corwin looks up from his sermon notes, takes in the sight of Hilda Spellman in, of all things, _trousers_ (denim ones at that, paired with a peasant top and a brown suede band across her forehead) and almost has a stroke right at his podium.

After the service, one of Zelda’s friends from the Academy stops to console her. It helps, though only marginally, to hear that her old friend’s fifteen-year-old is going through a similar rebellious stage, and she and the boy’s father are at wit’s end trying to sort him out before his Dark Baptism. She and Zelda wallow in mutual shame, and the other woman confesses that the only thing that works when her son gets out of line is a good, old-fashioned belt to the backside. _Too bad_ , she says, _that your sister's too old for that, eh_?

Nevertheless, Zelda seriously considers this as a solution later that afternoon, as she follows Hilda up their drive, observes the lewdness of the denim as it clings to her full ass.

Hilda, at the baptism of their third cousin Lavinia, is supernatural in her flowing white dress and sandals. Her hair, loose, moves in time with the night breeze. Blonde locks catch every shrift of firelight shadow, and Hilda has garden flowers threaded into individual strands. She looks like one of the earth goddesses that died when their Dark Lord revealed Himself to the First Coven. It’s like she was birthed from the forest, made from moonbeams and the earth’s first respiration.

Zelda watches her dance with the others, swaying with fluid motions that betray Hilda’s natural voluptuousness, do not accord with Zelda’s images of her bouncing around the kitchen. Hilda’s arms link with those of men, of women, the new initiate’s and then Edward’s, and Zelda hates each and every one of them for doing what she hasn’t the courage to do. She should be the one swaying hand-in-hand with Hilda, leading her off into the forest once the revelry is over.

She watches Abraham Hemlock approach her sister, quakes with jealousy as he places a tender hand on her shoulder. She only stills when Hilda shakes her head and he disappears to find someone else. Zelda thinks that now is her chance. She should pull Hilda away, lead her deeper into the woods, lay her down in soft grass and show her the kind of reverence that none of these ho-hum men they’ve known all their lives could muster for anything beyond their own cocks.

Instead she lets Brother Faustus slip his hand in hers, take her away from the fire and toward the tree line. Zelda catches Edward’s disapproving glare as they depart, thinks nothing of it. Feels no shame until she realizes Hilda is watching her, too.

She comes home much later and Hilda is in the kitchen, preparing a casserole to pop into the oven for tomorrow’s dinner. She should look less divine, surrounded by Grandmama’s cookbooks, Great Aunt Locasta’s faded china and the old cabinets that, on a whim last summer, she painted the most vulgar shade of turquoise. Should, but does not. She is made lovelier for being in her element, layering noodles and sauce in a pan while humming a melody Zelda does not recognize.

Zelda cannot articulate why her sister’s blossom-wreathed beauty under the tawdry electrical glow enrages her. She doesn’t know why she strides up to Hilda, pulls a rosebud from her hair and stomps it beneath her heel. Zelda has never been able to explain half the things she does when it comes to Hilda.

“Next time, sister, at least try to dress like a sane adult for coven functions,” she hisses, “If you humiliate me again, well, there are at minimum twenty different murder weapons in this room alone.”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

It is rare for Hilda to grumble about anything, but cleaning Ambrose’s room will bring it out of her every time. It is a task that the young warlock refuses to take on himself, which must, in fact, be done while he is safely occupied in the mortuary, lest he piss and moan about _my privacy, aunties_. In the first decade of Ambrose’s arrest, Edward had insisted that neither Hilda nor Zelda interfere.

“You’ll just teach him that someone will always be around to clean his messes. He ought to learn that this isn’t the case, especially considering his…well, _circumstances_ ,” Edward reasoned.

His sisters agreed in theory. But Ambrose took to bringing his gruesome little science experiments up to the attic with him, and the smell of that plus his dirty laundry plus the half-finished plates of food he left lying about had eventually become too much to bear. So now Hilda and Zelda take it in turns to go up and at least remove anything that could decay messily and unpleasantly, along with doing a bit of light dusting.

While she is at it, Hilda strips Ambrose’s sheets from his bed, holding them carefully away from her while trying not to imagine the various _things_ that could be all over them. As she begins the arduous task of walking with a heap of bedclothes obscuring her sight, she hears a soft plop right next to her shoe. Looks down, and then bends over to pick up the little baggy that has landed on the floor.

She does not know what she’s seeing until she opens the plastic sack and is overwhelmed by the scent.

 _Oi_ , she thinks, _where in Satan’s name did he get this_?

It’s easy enough, she knows, for coven members to obtain all manner of illicit substances, should they so desire. But Ambrose never leaves the house, and she knows she is not her nephew’s dope smuggler, doubts that either Edward or Zelda would do it, either.

None of the Spellmans have ever given drugs much thought, beyond occasionally partaking when they just happen to be on the menu at an event. Hilda has fond memories of Zelda in an upscale Paris opium den, of indulging in a little cocaine with Teddy at a grand duchess’s dinner party in turn-of-the-century Moscow. Beyond that, though…well, Zelda over-drinks sometimes, but that’s about as wild as their family gets these days.

Hilda pockets the little baggy, shaking her head, and then proceeds out the door with her nephew’s sheets.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

Zelda is pouring over the New Orleans _Times-Picayune_ when her sister strolls into the kitchen, stops in front of her, and drops something onto the table. The older witch barely moves her paper away from her face, gives the little bag only a cursory glance.

“What is it, Hilda?” she asks, in the tone of exhausted disdain that Hilda can—and does—perfectly parody when her sister is not around. 

“I…erm…well, I found this in Ambrose’s room.” 

Zelda puts the newspaper aside, leans forward to inspect the bag, does not react. 

“So?” she asks, nonplussed, “What do you want to do about it? Force the boy to watch _Reefer Madness_ on an endless loop until he understands that drugs are a slippery slope to _deviance and destruction_?" 

Zelda pronounces the last three words with comically wide eyes and a flippant toss of her head, then leans back in her chair, eager to see her sister fall apart under her mockery. She is surprised and disappointed when Hilda does no such thing. 

She simply shrugs and replies, “Not at all. I was actually thinking of baking a little into my famous walnut brownies. I’ll even share with you, if you ask nicely.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, okay, so this is going to be a three-shot now. I got up to 10 MS Word pages writing this chapter and I was like, "Whoa that's a lot." And this is now going to be a smut fic and I wanted to give proper shrift to the smut so that these ladies can worship each other the way they both deserve, so yeah, that's going to be chapter three. Which I will post within the next couple of days so that you all don't have to wait too long for it. For now, please accept stoned H + Z. They're fun, I promise.

Zelda lost for words is a rare and uncommonly lovely sight. Hilda would take the time to revel in it, if she didn’t think her enjoyment would be bought with a Cain pit vacation. The older sister keeps her eyes trained on the younger as Hilda takes the baggy back up, pops it into a front pocket of her flared trousers, and crosses the kitchen to get her baking implements together.

“Have you gone entirely mad, Hilda?” Zelda asks, “You’re really going to do this?”

Hilda shrugs. “Why shouldn’t I?”

Admittedly, there is no good reason why not. She should be grateful that there is finally evidence that wholesome little Hilda has vices at all, and that she is willing to indulge them.

Zelda makes a study of the younger witch, pale gold strands falling into her eyes as she gathers up flour and baker’s chocolate, breasts free beneath blowsy peasant-top. She does not recognize this braless libertine standing in Hilda’s place. Zelda’s sister is not spontaneous like this, not daring or even the least bit bad. 

She was once, though, Zelda remembers. Vision of Paris in the last century, younger sister considerably younger. Hilda looked like a Botticelli baby until her hundredth birthday at least, and neither she nor Zelda could have been older than seventy back then. Even then Hilda had been purer than even the mortals all around them. She had to be talked into it, bullied, really, and then Zelda had to teach her how to do it, to wrap her lips around the opium pipe and take the smoke into her lungs without coughing one right up.

Hilda’s sobriety—or lack thereof—could always be measured in how clothed she still was. In Paris her dress and petticoats had become an ever-growing taffeta-on-linen jumble at her feet until Zelda finally had to put a stop to it. Satan knows she had no desire to. She would have ripped the delicate fabric to shreds, pulled it right off her sister, but they were surrounded by mortals and she wouldn’t have Hilda exposed to their consuming eyes. 

She let Hilda get down to her corset and drawers before seizing her hands. But Zelda was lost in the opium haze, too, and in grabbing Hilda she lost her balance, toppling forward and spilling them both to the floor. There they had stayed, alternately taken by fits of giggles and shared flights of melancholy all night long. Once Hilda had bolted upright, pointed out the fairies fluttering overhead and pulled her sister close to her breast, saying, “Oh, aren’t they lovely, Zelds?” Zelda had never liked opium much, not until that moment, pressed close to Hilda’s bosom, admiring figments.

She swallows around the surge of emotion, banishes yesteryear’s phantoms and says, “Well, for one, you should be ashamed of yourself for pilfering your nephew’s drugs.”

“I’m only taking a little,” Hilda protests, “Besides, he should have found a better hiding place. Or, better yet, he should clean his own bloody room.”

Zelda often refuses to agree with her sister on sheer principle, but she can drum up no objection to that, so instead she simply snorts and raises her morning edition to eye level. She barely reads, pretends to be deep in contemplation and definitely not watching Hilda roll up her belled sleeves and reveal sturdy arms, sun-gilded. She throws ingredients together into a bowl, doesn’t measure, doesn’t need to, and stirs lovingly. Crosses to the far cabinet, stands on the tips of her bare toes to retrieve some utensil or other. A sliver of Hilda’s lower back, paler than the rest of her, tantalizes as her blouse lifts and her impossibly tight jeans outline each hemisphere of her ass.

It’s mesmerizing, and Zelda is so very tired of this, of Hilda waltzing around this kitchen with no idea how she looks. It’s been this way since they were both young, that summer when Hilda, hiding in the attic from Zelda and Grandfather’s broadsword, discovered some obscure great-aunt’s recipe cache. She was thinner then, but expanding, softening, valleys rapidly rising into mountains, and she held her sister spellbound. And for centuries, Zelda has watched and imagined, and Hilda has been oblivious, too focused on spinning sustenance and comfort out of nothing. 

Zelda reflects, as she does about one hundred times per decade, that she should have taken Hilda, after her baptism. She should have had Hilda over and over again, over all these years, but each time she contemplated it, she ran up against the same hidden and unacknowledged wisdom that always stilled her hand.

She could never do it, couldn’t possibly do that with Hilda, _to_ Hilda. Zelda can’t just grab her by the hips and seduce her into submission like she would any other witch. Hilda is different. It’s not that she hasn’t the capacity for it. Once Hilda pops, she will fuck, and she will fuck hard and well and thoroughly. But she will not _just_ fuck.

Hilda will want more. Hilda will want forever. And Zelda, fool that she is, would give it to her. Or, rather, she would _try_ to. Zelda would try because she loves her sister and wants her sister, has never wanted anyone but Hilda. And she would fail.

Zelda is not a forever witch. She is grasping hands and a fevered mouth and one night stands and unable to come without a choking hand at her throat or fingernails breaking through flesh. She is trying something once just for the novelty and then forgetting all about the person she tried it with the moment they’ve ceased touching her. Zelda is not gentle, she is not faithful or loving. She cannot give Hilda what she needs.

The brownies are deftly mixed, popped into the oven, and then when Zelda rejoins the land of the living, looks up from her paper, Hilda is gone and cocoa scent hangs about the kitchen. It’s luscious and tempting, like sin itself. The kitchen timer dings and Hilda reappears, lifting the baking pan from the oven, leaving the treats to cool and returning to the table, throwing a questioning glance at her older sister.

“So,” she says brightly, “Were you planning on joining me?”

Zelda goes to protest, thinks about Paris and opium, Hilda’s pale breasts barely contained by her stays. Hilda was so warm that night, bliss-fevered and hallucinating, pointing out the sprites flitting around Zelda’s rose-gold head. 

Zelda shrugs. “I have nothing better to do this evening” she says.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Do you think Ambrose will be cross with me, for baking his pot?”

“If you remember, sister, I raised that very issue before you delved into his stash. You didn’t seem too bothered by it then.” 

“Zelda,” Hilda’s voice is a soft hiss as she rolls her leaden body to the side, turning to Zelda and watching the room and the view outside the window and time itself shift around the older witch before resuming, “He’s going to be so angry.”

Zelda only shrugs, pops the rest of her brownie into her delicately rouged mouth and lays back against Hilda’s pillows. 

“Who cares?” she says, forgetting everything Mama taught her and speaking around her food. “What’s he going to do about it anyway?”

Hilda bites her lip, considers. Zelda has a point, but also…well, Ambrose is her only ally here. She and Zelda are fire and ice at the best of times, and Edward always seems to take Zelda’s side, matches her in his disapproval even if his criticisms are honey-dipped and frequently accompanied by a fond embrace or playful tousle of the hair. Ambrose, though, Ambrose talks to her. Better, Ambrose _listens_ to her, asks for her guidance and actually takes it, some of the time, and what will she do if she loses that, if her otherness within this family becomes absolute?

Her heart jackhammers at her sternum and there are tears welling in her eyes, and Satan bless it, why did she do this? It wasn’t even worth it, because Hilda’s not even stoned. She’s unsure if her proportions were off—she’s never made hash brownies before—or if Ambrose just bought cheap ditch weed, but she’s even managed to screw this up along with her entire relationship with her nephew.

“If you ask me,” Zelda says, bringing a finger to her mouth and swirling her desperately pink tongue around it, “The one you should be worried about is Tedward.”

Hilda’s brows knit. “Who?”

Zelda looks at her like she really is as stupid as she’s always suspected. “Our brother, Hilda. Obviously.”

“Our brother is Edward, Zelda.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You bloody well did not! You called him Tedward.” 

Before she can stop herself, a giggle escapes Hilda’s throat, followed by a raucous peal of laughter. 

“Zelda, you’re stoned!”

There is a flush rising over Zelda’s cheeks and spreading, down to her throat and décolletage, and it’s the prettiest thing in the world, and now Hilda's no longer worried about Ambrose or Edward—or even Tedward, for that matter—but instead about the more immediate threat, the emotions that she cannot suppress as deftly now that there’s pot blazing its way through her brain. 

She’s never faulted herself for staring at Zelda, for wanting Zelda, because everyone else does, too. How could they not? And with all the eyes in the world trained upon her, what could Zelda ever want with her?

Hilda is not unaware of what she looks like. Indeed, there’s no way she could be, with Zelda constantly there to remind her. She has been like this forever; there was never a time when Mama didn’t worry about her weight, when Zelda didn’t pinch her fingers around the flesh of Hilda’s stomach and tease. Hilda was always the chubbiest child at Black Mass, but everyone said she would grow out of it. 

“Just you wait until she comes up on fourteen or fifteen, Priscilla,” the old ladies at church used to say, when Mama expressed anxiety over her youngest child’s rotundity, “She’ll get taller and all that fat will just melt away. Why, I think she’ll be even lovelier than her sister.”

Hilda had hoped and prayed just as fervently as Mama. She would never be lovelier than Zelda; that was impossible, and Hilda had set her expectations low to avoid being let down. But she’d been disappointed, nonetheless, when age, instead of melting her down like a candle, only added more curves. 

Hilda had relied upon time, too, to take away the swimming in her belly when she was too close to her sister for too long, but the current was still there. Babbling along like Hilda couldn’t help but do when Zelda paid her any little bit of attention. Surging and flooding over at the hitched-up skirt revealing a bit of slender thigh, the edge of tongue caressing magenta-painted lower lip. It was understandable when she felt this way in youth, newly-initiated and curious, and even when no one touched her, nor expressed interest, Hilda was just beginning, and desire was supposed to be unbridled.

But now…she is just over 150 years old, just brushing up on middle age. And most of the time Hilda can really convince herself that she doesn’t want anyone, not like that. She is too old for the hassle, wants no drama, wants nothing but her kitchen and a good song on the radio and a nice cup of tea. Anyway, it isn’t like a virgin is the worst thing in the world to be. 

But then, Zelda. Always Zelda. Hilda’s youthful desire had seized upon her older sister—the closest thing to hand—and held on with iron jaws, and it is much too late now. These days, Zelda is just about the only thing that does it for her, and how very like Hilda, really, to choose the one person she knows she can never have.

She hates herself for it, most of the time, but Satan bless her if the indignant face before her now isn’t the most beautiful thing she’s seen with her own two eyes. Hilda’s too lost to really appreciate it, a thrall to the high that’s picking her up and taking her into the cosmos and then placing her softly back in her own bedroom again. Zelda shifts in and out of her focus, and she is shaking her head, denying the accusation that Hilda has levelled against her.

“Am not,” she says, her eyelids fluttering half-closed and then opening again, “Stoned. I’m not.”

She says it as evenly as though she’s taking inventory for the mortuary, scolding Ambrose for stealing her cigarettes again or pronouncing Hilda’s newest culinary masterpiece an unmitigated disaster. And Hilda is so used to that authoritative tone, so accustomed to simply nodding along, if for no other reason than to keep the Spellman family vessel away from the breakers, that she can almost believe it. Until Zelda lets out a little giggle, and then begins snickering so fiercely that her shoulders actually shake.

“You are!” Hilda points an accusing finger at her, and Zelda is still laughing even as she shakes her head.

“No!”

“Zelda Fiona, you are absolutely baked out of your mind!” Hilda screeches, doubling over with laughter.

“Shh!” Zelda raises a finger to her lips, still giggling, “They’ll hear you. Ambrose and Tedward.”

It’s a good enough point, even if it is delivered in between fits of laughter. Hilda can’t imagine that they’re being at all quiet. Ambrose won’t care, if he even hears them down in the mortuary. But Edward—well, he could come home any time, and he’ll pick up on a silencing spell right away…

“What are you doing?” Zelda asks as she watches her sister cross the room.

“Making sure they can’t hear us,” replies Hilda, pulling her record player out from the closet and setting it dead in the center of the sisters’ room. She gives almost no regard to record selection, simply grabs anything from the crate that she keeps by her bed. She’s gratified enough when she hears Stevie Nicks, looks down to find herself holding _Rumours_.

“Ugh. Why do you listen to this mortal filth?” Zelda asks, attempting to recline back on the bed gracefully and only managing to flop into the pillows.

Hilda, joining her, simply shrugs, prepares herself for the same fight they’ve had at least a dozen times since 1953. “It’s not that bad, Zelda.”

“Hmph. It’s obscene.”

“Mortal music wasn’t so obscene back when it was Billie Holiday. You liked her.”

“Yes, well. That was thirty years ago. The world has become a much less refined place since then.”

 _And thank Satan for it_ , Hilda thinks. She closes her eyes, tries to go along with the temporal slide this time instead of battling against it. The spinning in her head takes her down, until she’s lying at her sister’s feet, width-wise across the bed.

Zelda’s notions about “refinement” are Mama’s old ideas, rehashed and done over for a new century. Hilda was never the perfect Victorian doll that Mama wanted both of her daughters to be. She was the child who was always ruining her pretty—and very _expensive_ dresses, she thinks in her mother’s voice—by lying on her belly in the dirt to watch ants build their little hills, climbing the big tree in the backyard to see the sparrows’ nest hidden in its boughs. The disappointment had been constant and smothering, from the time at age five when she tipped the gravy boat onto her skirt, all the way up to her spinster status at fifty, the age when most young witches were beginning to settle down and punch out little witches and warlocks.

But Mama was dead now, and so was that world, hard as some in their church tried to keep its dry old bones rattling along. Hilda only wished, sometimes, that Zelda could realize it, embrace it.

“Maybe,” Hilda tries, “The world is better for being less ‘refined.’”

“Oh, hush, Hilda. Honestly, are you trying to get a reaction out of me?” Zelda asks. 

Her world has gone kaleidoscopic as well, but she’s as serious now as she’s ever been as she pulls herself to a sitting position, looks her sister up and down, from the wide bottoms of her jeans to the wooden beads around her neck. 

“Do you really think you’re shocking anyone with all of that?” Zelda waves a hand at Hilda’s attire, “You think you’re making some kind of statement? Ambrose pulls it off because he is young, but you are long past the age where rebellion and attention-seeking are cute, Hildegard.”

Hilda rolls her eyes, grateful that she’s looking at the ceiling and the shapes moving there rather than at her sister. Zelda might not be able to do a hell of a lot of damage in her inebriated state, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t try.

“Did you ever consider, Zelda, that my world doesn’t center on you?” An obvious lie, but she presses on, “That I don’t do everything I do just to get a rise out of you?” Hilda sends the question into the still air between them, not really expecting an answer, surprised when she gets one.

“Why else would you spend all your time dressed like a manic hobo clown and listening to terrible music?”

“Because I like it,” Hilda replies, and it’s so simple, but Zelda’s face scrunches up in thought.

“Satan’s hoof, Zelda,” says Hilda, moving on the mattress until she and her sister are side-by-side, “When was the last time you did something just because you liked it?”

She expects a prompt response, is surprised and, frankly, saddened when Zelda actually has to think about it. Her mouth opens, poises to form words, and then closes once again. Eyebrows draw together, and there’s clear distress apparent in the way she shakes her head and spits, “Satan, Hilda; I don’t know! I’m high right now; I can’t think!”

“Oh, Zelds…” Hilda is on the verge of reaching out, taking one cool ivory hand in her own. It’s dangerous, that; touching Zelda always is, but Hilda never stops trying. Sometimes, Zelda even lets her. She wonders if she is the only one who touches Zelda, really touches her, outside of the bedroom.

Before Hilda can reach out, though, Zelda is jumping up from the bed, visibly agitated. 

“That’s it!” she says, turning to her sister with eyes wide, pupils a dark sea of glass.

“What is?” asks Hilda.

Zelda gestures emphatically towards the record player. “This! The song! It’s the one you were humming in the kitchen the other day!”

And Hilda is trying to remember, but now she’s the one too stoned to think, so she just shrugs.

“It’s called ‘Gold Dust Woman,’” she supplies, reclining against her pillows.

“It’s nice,” Zelda says, worlds away. Without warning, she giggles and spins around in a little circle, and Hilda thinks that this is probably her signal to rush downstairs and get Ambrose, because clearly there’s something wrong with his weed. Even blazed off her arse, this can’t possibly be her sister, can’t be Zelda reaching out her hand to Hilda, begging her to get up and dance, frowning when Hilda shakes her head.

“Zelds, if I try to stand up I’m going to fall right over,” Hilda says, letting her head loll back and fingering the beads at her neck, feeling it in her soul when they clack together, “Pot apparently makes me lazy and hungry.”

“Fine, then, lie there like a lump,” replies Zelda, toeing out of her shoes and kicking them off to one side before reaching for the buttons on her satin blouse, opening it to reveal the ebony slip beneath.

“Zelds! What are you doing?”

“I am wearing merino and it’s midday and it’s hot up here, Hilda.”

Well, yes, it is now that Zelda’s blouse is on the floor and her thick skirt is on its way to joining it, sliding down her wiggling hips and then landing in a pool at her feet before it, too, is banished. 

And then her arms are over her head and her hips are undulating and Zelda—surprisingly, for someone who has been to about a thousand more balls and cotillions than Hilda’s ever seen in her life—is not a good dancer. But she is pretty, closing her eyes and swaying, fuzzed at the edges by Hilda’s low-level delirium. Zelda’s face is serenity in porcelain, and Hilda’s never seen her look like this. Her face and the fluid motion of her hips and Zelda’s slip drawn up nearly to the crux of her thighs do _things_ to Hilda, make her unable to decide if she wishes her sister would just stop or dance them both straight to perdition.

Thankfully, the song’s break apparently also ends Zelda’s fever, and she’s stumbling back to the bed, throwing herself down next to Hilda. She lands awkwardly, head thrown over Hilda’s chest, and at once she is back in Paris, surrounded by fairies and the rose tea perfume Hilda used to wear back then but doesn’t anymore. Now her sister smells like patchouli and sandalwood and she doesn’t like it as much. But Hilda is still there beneath it, cinnamon and sweat and the earth right in that instant after the first raindrop has soaked in. Zelda is breathing hard, and Hilda’s scent has her near to hyperventilation.

“You’re all sweaty,” Hilda says, reaching her hand out to Zelda’s hair just for something to touch. She’s shaky, though, thrown off center by the swirling at her temples, so she instead catches Zelda’s cheek, skin almost plush even beneath her makeup. She is about to pull back when Zelda turns into Hilda’s palm, lets out a little, eyes-closed sigh of contentment. 

And when she opens her eyes, Hilda’s staring, her expression somewhere between awe and panic, and there’s something stretching out between them, and it’s tenuous and pivotal and all Zelda can think is, _One wrong move…_ A single toe in the wrong direction and she will lose her sister forever, no more Hilda humming hippie nonsense and quietly keeping the entire family alive in the background and wearing jeans that perfectly frame an ass that Zelda wants nothing more than to sink her teeth into.

For the first time in her life, Zelda Spellman hesitates.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this took forever, and I am sorry for that. I had THE busiest week.
> 
> But hopefully the smut makes up for it?

Zelda hesitates. Hilda does not. Zelda has always been the arbiter of Hilda’s fate, the literal divide between life and death. Whatever is decided now will be the rudder that steers their relationship until they are both in the ground, and this is not something Hilda is willing to leave in her sister’s mercurial hands.

She alters their fate with a single touch of her lips. Desire sparks from nothing as her voluptuous mouth descends, presses close against delicate rose-petal lips. Hilda has kissed maybe three or four people in her life, the last one decades ago, but what she lacks in experience, she makes up for in firm, insistent certainty. Zelda has yet to be convinced, thinks that, later, she will likely rouse from this fever dream in a shrieking panic, but until then…Hilda.

Hilda deep and indulgent, tasting like chocolate and sweet herbs. Hilda inflamed, kindling Zelda as her tongue slips into the older witch’s mouth. Hilda, sensation in sin, Hilda everything. All that Zelda has ever searched for and failed to find in men, in women, in every tooth and nail sunk into her, every crack of the whip. 

“Zelda…” the younger witch moans, her voice whiskey and smoke. The kind of sultry that Zelda has always tried to call forth in her most unrestrained nighttime fancies, but never quite gotten correct. So much more tantalizing than she imagined, and whatever happens here, now, she’ll remember that gravelly timbre forever. She will imagine it when she is alone and cannot sleep, carry it with her in dreams where the dictates of family and propriety and everything that is wrong with Zelda herself no longer apply and she can love Hilda like she deserves.

 _The way_ , Zelda thinks, _that I cannot love her in reality_. It’s a sobering thought, even if Zelda’s head is still spinning when she pulls her mouth away from Hilda’s. The fog clears with each millimeter she puts between them.

Hilda frowns, confused. She’s hurt, and Zelda struggles. It is hard to see her sister look like that, even when she’s the reason for it. Especially then. 

Zelda’s not in the habit of explaining herself, but she wants to now, tries to summon forth the right words. The question is in Hilda’s wounded eyes, _do you not love me, do you not want me_ , and the answer is yes, to both, to all, but how can she make soft, romantic little Hilda understand that this isn’t enough? Family and propriety still very much apply here, and Zelda is Zelda, with all her personal failings, and all these things will sink them.

“Zelds?” Hilda asks, “Why did you stop?”

Zelda bites her lip, fights with herself, and finally replies, “Because, Hilda. This is not what you want.”

“Like heaven it isn’t! And since when is that up to you, anyway?”

“You are my younger sister,” says Zelda, in the firm tone that always works on Hilda, “It is my duty to keep you from harm.” 

Zelda is harm; she is brutality and she is predatory. She’s kissed Hilda once and is already hungry for the feel of the smaller woman beneath her, starved to know how her skin tastes, to savor the warmth of her breasts, feast between her thighs. If she lets herself have Hilda now, it will not be just once. Zelda will not be able to stay away from her, and that will prove dangerous. Hilda’s tender little heart is not safe with her.

“I…I do not wish to draw you into something you are not prepared for,” Zelda tries, “I have no desire to damage you.”

“You are _constantly_ damaging me, Zelda. Always hurting me. And I still want you. I have never wanted anything but you.”

“But this is different. You don’t know what you’re asking for, Hilda.”

“That’s rubbish!” the younger witch hisses, “I am not a simpleton or a child! I know perfectly well what I want, and what it means. Satan’s hoof, Zelda; why do you think I’ve waited so long for it?”

“Hilda…”

She is cut off by the sight of her sister reaching down, catching the hem of her blouse, pulling it up to reveal her navel, then the paunch of her tummy and, finally, the rounded bottoms of her breasts.

“What…Hilda, what in Satan’s name are you doing?” Zelda asks, stunned.

“I am offering myself to you,” Hilda replies, slipping the blouse over her head, leaving herself exposed, “Bloody _take me_!”

Hilda practically shouts the last bit, and there is Ambrose downstairs, Edward due home imminently. Zelda’s hand covers her sister’s mouth, and that’s a miscalculation on her part. She realizes it at the first touch of Hilda’s lips, just the faintest silken press before Hilda’s tongue darts out, tracing right along Zelda’s heart line. Zelda is wide-eyed, turning toward Hilda, gaze drawn first to the balled-up shirt in her hand, then to what its absence has revealed.

Hilda’s breasts, heavy on her robust frame, are divine imperfection. Zelda drinks in the light sag of the skin, the asymmetry, the stretch marks along each swell. It’s mesmeric, the way that Hilda’s nipples, already straining, tighten under her sister’s scrutiny.

“Zelda,” rasps Hilda, voice muffled by the palm over her mouth, “Zelda, please…touch me.”

Zelda can deny her sister many things, has spent both of their lives denying Hilda, but she cannot say no to this. She reaches out her free hand, tentatively palms one nipple, revels in the crinkling of the areola beneath her hand, in Hilda’s sigh as she moves to enclose that nipple between her thumb and index finger. Zelda pinches gently, quickly. Her hands are fevered, greedy as she grabs a handful of the younger woman's tit.

There’s nothing left of Zelda’s resolve when Hilda moves her mouth from under her restraining palm, comes forward to kiss her again, and she does not even attempt to protest as Hilda’s arms wrap around her, pull her back down to the mattress. She is cradled in the smaller witch’s hips, denim-clad thighs brushing her sides, and Hilda’s pelvis tilted beneath her.

Zelda breaks their kiss and moves lower, her tongue mapping the outline of her sister’s jaw, finding a sensitive place at the juncture of her neck and her ear, licking there lightly and then sucking. Hilda squirms against her, and Zelda can feel groans vibrating against her cheek, and this is bliss, Hilda’s sighs and the skin-sweet flavor of her. 

Bliss, too, is feeling Hilda’s nipples pebbled against her sternum, that sensation drawing her down, compelling her to lick first one tawny peak and then the other. Hilda’s torso bows up as Zelda pulls a nipple into her mouth, and the older witch takes the opportunity to slide her arms beneath her sister’s back, so that when Hilda comes down, her bum rests on Zelda’s hands and each palm is cupping a perfect, denim-clad globe.

Zelda moves to Hilda’s other nipple, sucks there, too, and her hands traverse the waistband of her sister’s jeans and then burrow inside. She charts the plane of Hilda’s lower back, and then her hands are filled with Hilda’ ass, flesh plush and pliable, and sweet Satan, she’s so close to reaching nirvana and she hasn’t even gotten to the younger witch’s pussy yet.

Hilda pulses beneath her sister’s ministrations, feels as though every inch of her, from the crown of her head to her quivering cunt, has turned into a singular, frantic heartbeat. She begs Zelda, whispers, “please, please,” has no idea what she’s asking for because she wants the older witch everywhere, can’t pinpoint which bit of her needs attention most urgently, because Hilda has become need itself.

She whimpers, and her fingers drop to her waist, pick at the button on her fly. Her jeans are too tight, the fabric too heavy, and Hilda is desperately hot, burning to be naked for Zelda, to let her sister’s hands and mouth roam free. Before she can pop the button, Zelda’s hand is circling her wrist.

“No,” she says, pulling Hilda’s hand away gently, placing a light kiss to her ribs, “I want to do that.”

Hilda swallows hard, nods, gasps as Zelda’s fingers ghost over her belly and undo the button easily. Her zipper is brought down in one fluid motion, and then Zelda’s tugging at her jeans, and Hilda helps her, wiggling her hips until she hears the garment rustling to the floor. 

Hilda’s mound is golden and glorious, and Zelda is entranced. She rests her head on her sister’s stomach, skims fingers over Hilda’s navel and then the trail of fine, pale hairs beneath it, follows that down to the thatch between her legs. Her mouth follows the same route, tongue dipping into belly button, cheek rubbing against lower-tummy fuzz, nose poking into pubic hair to catch the scent of sweat and musk and sex.

Zelda kisses her sister’s downy curls, draws her tongue over them to taste their wetness, then licks right down the seam of Hilda’s lips before placing her fingers on either side to pry them apart. Hilda is beautiful here, pearl pink on her outer labia, inner lips so dark they almost reach fuchsia, rosebud clit engorged and straining. Zelda puckers her lips, blows a soft current over her sister’s flesh, is enthralled by the way Hilda contracts at the sensation.

The younger witch is on the verge of begging her to stop looking, stop teasing, just bloody _do something_ , when Zelda’s tongue circumnavigates her opening, licks from there to her clit, and then lingers, fluttering, makes Hilda hiss as her hips cant forward and her hands reach out to fist handfuls of Zelda’s hair. 

Their church looks upon sex as a sacrament. Zelda had explained this to Hilda when the latter was thirteen and woke up one morning with crimsoned knickers and tearful eyes. Hilda knew what the blood meant; Mama sat her and Zelda both down, upon the occasion of the elder sister’s menarche, and gave them the same talk. She was meant to be a woman, then, like Zelds. And, like Zelds, she would eventually be expected to put her womanhood to good use.

The performance of coitus, the act of using the body that your Master has given you to extract every ounce of the pleasure He entitles you to, is the ultimate form of worship. Or so Edward had said when Hilda was nineteen and still a virgin and he’d felt compelled to subject her to the most awkward heart-to-heart in the history of sibling-kind. Hilda had argued that their Dark Lord gave them free will for a reason, and wasn’t exercising that will—by refusing to sleep with someone just because it was expected of her—a more honest and worthy manner of prayer? Edward threw up his hands and declared her hopeless.

But Hilda grew tired of having her faith called into question. That year, at the Beltane celebration, she let a man lead her away from the fire. He got her dress off her shoulders and his hand up her skirt before panic compelled her to push him aside and flee. She repeated the experiment later in the year, at a Solstice party in London. Her partner of choice was Verena McCormack, brunette and beautiful, and, as Vee dropped to her knees and lifted Hilda’s hem, she had thought she was getting somewhere. But fear seized her at the last moment, and that had been the end of Vee and the end of Hilda’s experimentation.

But if she had known…oh, if she had only known that anything could feel like this…

Well, if she had known, she probably still would have waited for Zelda. It took Hilda some time to figure out exactly what it was that had kept her from partaking in the act. She came home from England and saw her sister for the first time in damn near thirty years, and then she knew what she had been waiting for. By then it was too late; they were both well into their fifties. Their sibling rivalry was so firmly ingrained that they couldn’t help falling into the same patterns they established in the nursery, the first time Zelda yanked her little sister’s pigtail and Hilda retaliated with a kick to the shin.

But no matter what cruelties they subjected each other to, it was always Zelda. Zelda or nothing at all, and since Zelda seemed an impossibility, Hilda had contented herself with her presumed lot. That final sacrament would have to go unfulfilled, and if it really mattered all that much to the Dark Lord, then, well, Hilda just prayed that He was in a generous mood the day Zelda finally killed her for good.

But now…well, now there is a temple between her thighs and she and Zelda are both devotees, and Hilda understands why this is a holy rite. Before, when Hilda even dared to consider sex, she had failed to see anything but lewdness in the spectacle of flesh on flesh. No matter the parts involved, or the various formations that she could configure in her mind’s eye, it all just seemed so abject, so thoroughly _nasty_ , that Hilda could always convince herself that she wasn’t missing much.

Her opinion, indeed, has not shifted all that radically, even with Zelda between her legs and tendrils of pleasure caressing all over. It’s pure profanity, the slurping sounds Zelda’s mouth makes on her cunt, the scent of sex heavy in the room, the imagined visual of her fluids thick on Zelda’s tongue. But there is divinity in it, too, in the thought that, even through all of that nastiness, Zelda still wants to do this with her, draws her own enjoyment from it. It is vulgar and it is sacred, and it’s amazing how sex can manage to be both at once, and this is Hilda’s last conscious thought before she comes.

Her entire frame contracts and releases, hips arching and scream shaking the edges of the microcosm that has sprung up around her and Zelda’s lovemaking. She falls back to the bed still enraptured, scrambles to find her sister, needs Zelda next to her. Long, slender fingers lace through Hilda’s chubbier ones, and then Zelda is there, bosom seemingly made for Hilda to rest her head against, lips planting fairy kisses at her hairline.

“Zelda…” Hilda is breathless, but there is so much she wants to tell the older witch, so much that she urgently needs to make her understand. All that she can manage, though, is a soft-whispered, “I love you.”

“I love you, too, little one,” says Zelda. She bites her lip, considers something, then continues: “I’ve always loved you, Hilda.”

Hilda’s mouth curls up into a smile, and she’s jocular when she replies, “Hard to believe that, when you’ve spent the last hundred and fifty years putting me in my grave.”

She expects Zelda to chuckle, or to give her one of the little pinches they sometimes exchange, when they are in a place where they can laugh and play like sisters. Instead, Zelda just sighs, cups Hilda’s face and turns the younger witch to look at her.

“I’m sorry about that, Hilda,” she says, “I don’t…I don’t know why I do that…”

Hilda thinks that she does, looks into her sister’s velvet-blue eyes and is sure. There’s pure truth there in Zelda’s serious gaze, a truth that probably even she doesn’t realize yet, isn’t ready to comprehend. But Hilda understands well enough, and in this moment she forgives the older witch for all trespasses against her. Past, present, and, inevitably, future.

“It’s all right, Zelds,” she says, nuzzling into her sister’s neck.

“No, Hilda, it isn’t. I…I never…I won’t do it again. Ever. I swear it; I won’t.”

Hilda kisses her sister’s cheek. 

“Yes, you will,” she says, “You can’t help it. But it’s all right.” And, for now, it truly is. Zelda will kill her, again and again ad infinitum. Zelda does not how to love without pain, without destruction, and possibly—probably—she never will. Death is the price for Hilda’s devotion to her sister, and, in between the killings, they will simply have to strive to make the love worth it.

“Hilda…” Zelda begins, but the younger witch shushes her. This is a conversation they will need to have, eventually, but it will be a long road for Zelda, to understanding, to acceptance. And it is not a journey Hilda is eager to begin right now, not when Zelda is so close, fevered lips and so much delicious pale skin for Hilda’s hands to explore. She reaches beneath her sister’s slip, loves the way that Zelda’s breath hitches as she skims her thigh.

She is about to ruck up all that indulgent fabric when there is a knock at the door, startling both sisters, drawing them quickly away from one another, and then Ambrose’s voice is calling out.

“He knows!” Hilda says, pulling rumpled covers up to hide her face. Whether she’s talking about the drugs or the sex, Zelda cannot be sure, but, either way, she is profoundly irritated at the interruption, ready to pull open the door and hex her nephew into oblivion.

“Aunties!” Ambrose calls, “I…erm…did…did one of you clean my room?”

Hilda’s face appears from beneath the blankets, and her eyes are wide, pupils blown.

“He’s going to be so cross!” she squeaks.

Zelda rolls her eyes. “Oh, calm yourself, Hilda. If you wish, I will take responsibility. He won’t argue with me.”

She climbs out of bed, grabs her robe off of a chair and reaches down to pick up Hilda’s jeans and blouse, tossing them to the younger witch before heading toward the door. Later, she and Hilda will sit Ambrose down for a seriously overdue conversation. He will require a lecture on taking up his part of the chores, including and especially his room. Also, Zelda will personally inform him that he is not to bring drugs into the house unless he is prepared to share. For now, though, the lad needs to learn to respect the sanctity of a closed door.


End file.
